Pedias & Tables - 5

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Landolt–Börnstein is a systematic and extensive data collection in all areas of physical sciences and engineering published by Springer Science+Business Media. Originally, the project started with the first work published in 1883 by the physicist Hans Heinrich Landolt and the chemist Richard Börnstein. Currently Landolt–Börnstein includes more than 180,000 pages in 55,000 online documents. Besides, it offers 120,000 figures, more than 1 million literature references and 65,000 keywords to ease the direct access for users. Landolt–Börnstein also lists more than 72,000 element systems, 150,000 chemical substances, more than 530,000 substance-property pairs and nearly 1,5 million synonyms.

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Hmm...

1 million references...

The umlaut on Bornstein tells me they must be Germans. And Germans are known for their systematic, exhaustive and compulsive documentation. They are born Pedia and Table buffs. 

When I told DB in 1992 that an unknown chap called Harshad Mehta swindled the banks to the tune of Rs 4000 crores, he reported the next day that he couldn't sleep that night. Our monthly take-home then was Rs 1500 (no crores!). 

Likewise when I read in 1970 that Klein and Sommerfeld wrote 4 volumes on Tops, I couldn't believe it. Klein was Sommerfeld's Guru.

And there was a chap called Pauli whose Guru was none other than that Sommerfeld who commanded teenaged Pauli to write up a review article on Relativity. 

And listen:

...his Theory of Relativity appears in the Enzyklopaedie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften, Volume 5, Part 2 (1920), his Quantum Theory in Handbuch der Physik, Vol. 23 (1926), and his Principles of Wave Mechanics in Handbuch der Physik, Vol. 24 (1933).

Hmm! Volumes upon German Volumes...

During my 'research' at AU in 1963 I saw a row of Solid State Physics Volumes edited by Frederick Seitz and David Turnbull. They were about 10 in number. It was Wigner who inspired Seitz to take up the job. Now I see there are not less than 63 Volumes of the legendary series.

There were Supplements too. And I felt good when the Supplement 1 was by T. P. Das and E. L. Hahn.

Wigner and Hahn again...

William Shirer wrote a book called the Rise and Fall of Third Reich. It is a massive tome of more than 1500 pages in small print and very readable...I read it when I was a bachelor. It may not be a scholarly work but it is exhaustive. Shirer mentions that most of his work was based upon the documentation that Germans themselves meticulously did during the Third Reich and the World War II:

Rise and Fall is based upon captured Third Reich documents, the available diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, General Franz Halder, and of the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano...

Hindus cared little for documentation and had to rely on Chinese travelers and their dairies to know about their own history. But Buddhists were different. They built stupas, wrote on stones, painted pictures on the walls in caves rediscovered by the British...

The definitive and beautiful Sanskrit dictionary-cum-thesauras is by the Buddhist scholar Amarasimha.

I am no German nor Buddhist but my own blogs now number about 1300...'Life & Times of gpsastry (1943 - )'.

Soon after I started visiting the Central Library at IIT KGP during the 1960s, I discovered the Landolt-Bornstein Tables. And since I had a solid state experimental physics research background (that came to nothing), I used to browse the book for pleasure, just as I used to browse the 2-Volume Webster.

Recently I was talking to Prof S. H. Rao (GG) about our times at IIT KGP. He was the Chairman of the Central Library for a term of 3 years. He narrated to me an incident when a Physics Professor of Experimental Physics approached him if he knew the value of the dielectric constant of ruby mica. And SHR told him to look up the Landolt-Bornstein Tables in the CL. And the Phy Prof asked him: "What is that, again?"

And SHR told me he couldn't digest the phenomenal ignorance of IIT KGP physics professors. 

That was of course too much of a hasty generalization.

But it recalled an incident DB told me that happened to him when he was at the 1-month Summer School in Particle Physics at Ooty around 1968. One youthful Dr. Srinivasan was talking about James Thurber and DB asked him:

DB: What is this Thurber's specialization?

Srinivasan: Haven't you read any writings of Thurber?

DB: No...

Srinivasan: Your education is incomplete...

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Tailpiece

Carl Jung's elaborate analysis of more than 400 of Pauli's dreams is documented in Psychology and Alchemy 

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